Altana co-founder Peter Swartz '07 and economist Amit Khandelwal on how AI is remaking global trade

Peter Swartz '07, co-founder and chief science officer of Altana, returned to Yale on September 30 for a discussion of trade and AI with Amit Khandelwal, the Dong-Soo Han Professor of Global Affairs and Economics and a member of the faculty board of the Blue Center for Global Strategic Assessment.

Altana is an enterprise artificial intelligence company that serves as a platform for global trade and supply chains. The conversation ranged from supply chain monitoring to tariff compliance, touching on how AI is reshaping the tools available to governments, suppliers, importers, and logistics firms alike — from environmental regulation to government sanctions.

When Swartz started Altana in 2018, he and co-founders saw two disruptions converging: an increasingly fragmented global trade system, and AI's rising ability to manage that complexity. The platform, he said, was built as a three-sided network linking governments, importers and exporters, and logistics providers — each navigating enforcement demands and regulatory complexity across jurisdictions.

"At the same time as you're stopping illegal or detrimental behavior, you can actually promote growth," Swartz said, pointing to "green lane" mechanisms that move compliant shipments through faster, even as enforcement improves.

Much of Wednesday’s discussion centered on AI-powered visibility deep into supply chains. Companies typically know their first-tier suppliers but little beyond that, Swartz said. The full "recursive bill of materials" of a finished product has remained elusive.

What has changed, he said, is the ability to construct a reliable approximation of the network of suppliers down to a specific factory site. This is the basis for tools like Altana's "product passports," which trace a product's components back through each tier of suppliers. He pointed to examples including the European Union's deforestation regulation, which requires tracing the deforestation impacts of a product’s materials, or the EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, which taxes imports based on embedded carbon, traced back through multiple tiers.

Khandelwal, who has researched customs enforcement in developing countries, noted that high tariffs — often a critical early source of government revenue — combined with weak state capacity create strong incentives for evasion. Citing Madagascar, where roughly half of government revenue comes from tariffs collected by a small number of officers, he said, "If you don't have the will at the top, enforcement will not happen" — and estimated that under-enforcement leaves tens of billions of dollars a year uncollected worldwide. Asked whether AI tools could substitute for that weak capacity, Swartz said they were instead a "a strong complement."

In the Q&A, Swartz was asked for advice for students interested in careers spanning policy and technology. He recommended building real depth in a skill beyond policy alone, paired with an understanding of international affairs. "There's going to be a lot of opportunity and a lot of tumult," he said. "That's just the world we live in."

The Blue Center’s co-lecture series continues on October 14 with Ambassador Nathaniel Fick, the former Ambassador-at-Large for Cyberspace and Digital Policy, in discussion with Professor Charalampos Papamanthou of the computer science department.